How To Hate Your Fated Mate (Shifters of Cedar Run #1)

Chapter One

Henrietta

“Repeat after me: We do not bite the Alpha,” Uncle Silas says.

I don’t need to ask which Alpha he’s talking about. He could only be referring to Andrew Ward of the Moonstone Pack, the bastard who’d betrayed my family fifteen years ago.

“He should be so lucky,” I scoff, as I survey the pizza pan on the weathered wooden table in front of me.

“What did you just say to me?” Silas glares at me, trying to project Alpha energy, and failing as usual.

Our pack doesn’t have an Alpha since my father died a few months ago, but his brother Silas is sort of our pack leader at the moment. Our lack of Alpha is the reason my clan was forced to slink back to the last place in the world that I’d ever want to be - Cedar Run, Arkansas.

So there we were, in the guesthouse of my former pack, eating lunch before we head over to visit the Moonstone Pack. Pack of wieners, that is.

I don’t say that out loud. I do have some survival instincts.

I lean over the table and shove a big slice of pizza in my mouth, taking an enormous bite.

“Repeat it,” Silas says, glowering at me.

I make a gesture towards my mouth as I chew, and shrug apologetically. I would never talk with my mouth full. The horror.

“Chew that food and swallow it, and repeat what I just said!” my uncle growls.

I chew very slowly and make more gestures. What? Does he want me to choke?

He fixes me with a steely glare. “We are going to go enhance their crop growth, and they will pay us a tidy sum. We need that sum. Right now we are beggars, living on the charity of whatever pack will take us in. Do you think I enjoy that? It’s humiliating!”

As he speaks, my Aunt Dorcas’s shoulders sag and her eyes fill with tears.

Dorcas is the complete opposite of Silas—soft where he’s hard, round where he’s all sharp angles. Her white-streaked brown hair is pulled back in a braid that’s pinned up in a crown on her head. She looks worried. She has every right to be.

When our family clan was kicked out of the Shadowpine pack 15 years ago, we were forced to form our own very small pack, made up of our family members. Most packs have their own lands, and multiple families called clans, and hundreds of members. We were the smallest pack I’d ever heard of.

But at least we had my father, who was a strong enough Alpha to scare off any enemies – until his bad heart took him from us.

Now we’re not only a very small pack – the Romero family pack currently has 22 members - we also don’t have an Alpha. A pack without an Alpha is weak and vulnerable. Any pack in the country could take us over, kill or banish the males, and do whatever they liked with the women and children.

The humans would never step in to help us.

There’s a truce between humans and shifters, since the Shifter-Human Accord of the 1960s, but they avoid us and we avoid them.

We live in our own territories, and if we’re traveling to another shifter territory, we just drive straight through the human areas without stopping.

And humans never interfere with inter-pack affairs. The only time they’d sit up and take notice was if anything we shifters did affected them.

The only thing keeping us safe at the moment is that we’re visiting our former pack and staying on their lands. We haven’t proved our worth yet, though. At the moment, we’re contributing nothing to them. And we’re dragging a bad reputation with us, unfair and unearned though it is.

Damn it.

I swallow my pizza – and my pride - and nod. Unfortunately, my uncle needs me. The two of us are the strongest plant mages that our pack has. Together, our powers can significantly increase the yield of crops and strengthen them against insect damage.

“I will not bite Andrew Ward,” I recite dutifully. “I will keep my mouth shut. I will help you with the crops. We’ll earn enough money that we can pay our way.”

And once we earn that money, I will punch him in his smug, stupid face, consequences be damned, I think.

“Good,” Silas growls, and Dorcas brightens up immediately, smiling at me. “Maybe you won’t even run into him,” she suggests. Always the optimist.

She wasn’t exactly what I would call a mother figure – nobody ever stepped in to take that role after my mother died giving birth to me – but she made sure I was fed and clothed.

Mostly. I was always welcome to wander into any family’s kitchen and help myself at mealtime.

The women in the pack all took turns caring for me until I was old enough to care for myself.

My late father was a strong Alpha and a great plant mage, but he never really seemed to cotton to the “parent” thing. I could disappear for days, and he wouldn’t notice.

“We’re leaving in fifteen minutes,” Silas adds.

I heave a martyred sigh and set down the slice of pizza. I’ve lost my appetite.

* * *

As we drive through the pack lands, past sprawling homes with lush lawns and colorful flower gardens, I can see that the Moonstone Pack has continued to thrive in the fifteen years since my family’s exile. This does nothing to improve my mood.

We find our potential client on the western side of the Moonstone Pack’s property.

Carlton Ward is a beanpole of a man with a shock of white hair and a tanned, heavily lined face. He's standing at the edge of his cornfield when we pull up, hands in his pockets.

Uncle Silas parks the truck on a patch of gravel beside a weathered equipment shed and kills the engine.

The April air hits me the moment I step out — warm and thick with the smell of turned earth.

I feel that low hum under my skin that always happens when I'm near growing things. It’s so continually present that I don’t even notice it unless I focus.

The corn is only ankle-high, pale green shoots in long straight rows, but even at this stage I can feel the life in it. I can also feel the stress, the disease chewing at it.

I press my hands to my sides and follow my uncle over to Carlton, who raises a hand in greeting. I’d met Carlton a handful of times when I was small — he'd always been decent enough, for a Moonstone wolf.

"Silas," he says, shaking my uncle's hand. Then he nods at me. "Henrietta. You've grown up."

“Yes I did,” I say, forcing a bright smile on my face.

Grew up away from here, away from the Shadowpine packlands that were our rightful home…

"As I mentioned, our yield's been down three seasons running," Carlton says, turning to the field. "Pest damage, mostly. Black cutworm's the worst of it."

"There are European corn borers too, from what I can feel," I say.

Carlton looks at me quizzically, arching an eyebrow. “You can feel it? Without touching it?’

"She can sense it," Silas says smoothly. "That's why she's here."

Carlton nods slowly, something shifting in his expression. "Can you fix it?"

"Between the two of us, we can double your yield and eliminate most of the damage," Silas says. "Twenty-five percent up front, the remainder at season's end."

"Done. I’ll have the money in your account tomorrow morning, and you can come by to get started then," Carlton says, and they shake on it. There’s no need to sign anything. A shifter’s word is his bond.

I exhale. There it is — the money that will get us back on our feet.

I turn back to the field and let myself feel it properly, opening up that part of me I usually keep tucked away. The hum deepens, spreads up through my feet and into my chest. The corn is struggling but it's stubborn and determined. I like that in a plant.

My uncle walks up to me and stands next to me. We close our eyes and focus.

Silas’s magic brushes against mine—deeper, heavier, more controlled than my own. His power feels like ancient tree roots sinking into the earth. Mine moves faster, lighter, weaving around his.

I push my magic downward.

Warm green energy pours out of me and into the soil. The roots greedily absorb it. The corn straightens almost immediately, stalks thickening, leaves unfurling wider toward the sun.

I can feel the pests—tiny chewing mouths buried in the stalks, eggs hidden beneath leaves, fat little larvae viciously destroying crops.

Rude.

I send a sharp pulse of magic through the field.

The insects react instantly. The borers wriggle free from the stalks and drop to the dirt. The cutworms shudder and die. My uncle is pouring his strength through the field, and I know, without even looking, that the corn is slightly greener and a teeny bit taller now.

The sound of voices and boots on gravel grabs my attention, and at the same time, I feel a strange prickling under my skin, a sense of urgency, a sudden need to…what? What do I need to do?

I turn around.

Three men are coming across from the direction of the main buildings, laughing about something, moving with easy loose-limbed confidence.

I know all three of them. I grew up two miles from here, and the Ward brothers have been as much a fixture of Cedar Run as the water tower and the Late Shift diner on Main Street.

First my eyes light on Cole Ward, the middle Ward boy. He was a jokester as a kid and I can see that nothing’s changed. He’s got that same mischievous expression and permanent smirk, currently saying something that makes Jesse Ward shove him sideways, which only widens the smirk.

Jesse, the youngest, I remember as Cole’s nemesis and best friend.

Cole sees me first. "Henrietta Frost," he says. “So that’s what you look like grown up.” He nods, looking half amused and half approving. There’s nothing lascivious in his gaze at all. Just that same familiar smirk.

"Cole," I say. "Your brothers haven’t murdered you yet?”

His smirk widens into a full grin. “Not for lack of trying.”

Jesse grins at me. "Henny Penny. Good to see you. It’s been a minute, hasn’t it?"

I manage a wry smile. Don’t look at Andrew, don’t look at Andrew…“Oh, the nickname. You remembered it. I’m so glad.”

And then Andrew looks up.

The oldest. He’s the Alpha now, since his father died in a death challenge several years ago.

He's always been the serious one — even at twelve he carried himself like he had somewhere important to be. But twelve-year-old Andrew Ward and the man currently crossing the field toward me are separated by about six inches of height, and shoulders that should belong to a lumberjack.

One glance at him and my traitorous body wakes up and says, hey there, cowboy.

The hum under my skin — the one that's been occupied with corn roots and pest damage — shifts into something else completely. Something urgent and insistent and pointed directly at the man with the amber eyes. The man who destroyed my family.

My whole body is pulsing with an intense awareness. I’ve seen plenty of hot men before, but I’ve never felt anything like this.

Is he my…he can’t be, there’s no way…

Oh no.

The intensity of this reaction - there’s only one thing that this can mean.

Fated Mate.

That makes no sense, though. Is fate on the fritz today? Broken somehow? Does that happen?

Because Andrew Ward cannot be the shifter who’s meant for me. Not after what he did to us.

Fifteen years ago, when he was twelve, he witnessed my father exchanging a package with someone in a forest, misunderstood what he saw, and went straight to the local shifter council with it.

My father barely escaped execution at the time.

We had a choice between exile and death.

Fun choice, huh? We’ve been on the run ever since, moving from pack to pack, scraping out a living, never welcome anywhere.

And Andrew went from the boy I might have had a little kid crush on, to the person I despise most on this planet.

He hasn't seen me yet. He's frowning at something Jesse is saying, that same expression he wore at twelve when his brothers were acting like jackasses.

His eyes find mine, and his eyes widen in shock. He sucks in a sharp breath.

He feels it too. And from the dismayed look in those amber eyes, he’s no happier about it than I am.

For one suspended second, we just look at each other. Waves of dizziness flow over me. My wolf is running in circles, demanding release, and an image of Andrew and I dashing through the forest together in wolf form unspools before my mind’s eye.

With those high cheekbones and full lips and that arrogant expression stamped onto his handsome face, he is so damned hot.

"Excuse me," I say, with tremendous dignity. “The plant magic really takes it out of me. I need a minute.”

I turn around and walk into the equipment shed.

Inside it smells like engine oil and dry wood and something metallic. A yellow tractor gleams in the dim light. Shelves of equipment line every wall. A single bulb hangs from the ceiling.

I press my back against the wooden shelving unit and stare at door and think, with rising panic:

Andrew Ward.

Andrew Ward is my fated mate.

I wait for some kind of cosmic correction. A sign that the bond has misfired, that I'm having some kind of stress-induced hallucination.

Nothing. Just the steady insistent pull of it, the pulsing awareness, the erotic tingle sweeping from my scalp to my toes.

I struggle for words and finally find one.

“No.”